Verena Hausmann — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 21:59:54 +0000

Tonight we attended one of the popular Finnish sitz-parties. You are asking what a sits party is? Yes, we also did when coming here! In Germany that would probably never happen, but in Finland people come together to get drunk (okay, this part is also true for Germany) and sing songs together. How this goes about … People come together in the evening. Name signs for everybody on the table make sure that you meet new people. Everyone gets a mostly 3 course meal which is spread through the whole evening (and not really the point) and a lot of alcohol to drink. Rules are communicated in the beginning and then songs are sung. Often the party has a special theme.
The party we attended this night was a “German” sitz party. Most songs still where in Finnish or Swedish, but a few also where in German. It was really funny, but too much alcohol!

Verena Hausmann — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 22:59:52 +0000

As Katie had birthday on the 19th March she decided to celebrate into it with a few people. We backed a cake and went to her place to meet and play cards. At around 11:30 we took the last normal bus going into the city. As the Irish pub was too crowded we decided to go to Monkey and celebrate there.

Verena Hausmann — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 22:13:33 +0000

Saint Patrick (387–461) is the patron of Ireland. On the 17^th March St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated. Normally not in Finland, but as ESN is quite active they organized a St. Patrick’s Day party at Monkey, a night club here in Turku. As we know three Northern Irish people who celebrate this day, we joined them. It was a very nice and funny evening and a lot of people wore at least something in green as particular for this day. People were nice, the music was quite good and we had a lot of fun!

(The guy with the white shirt is from Northern Ireland)

Verena Hausmann — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 22:00:06 +0000

Jouko, one guy in one of our courses asked us if we could help him and his student union to organize a German evening. The idea was to cook a three course meal and have fun for around 40 people. So we met on Tuesday to decide what to cook and started cooking on Wednesday evening. We were 3 Germans and a whole bunch of Fins who helped us cooking. The result wasn’t too bad. We had to tomato soup for the beginning followed by Döppekoochen, potato salad and sausages as the main course. At the end we had chocolate pudding with cream as a desert.

And people had fun playing Topfschlagen, writing down tonge twisters (e.g. Fischers Fritz), answering questions about Germany…

That was how the main course looked like.

Verena Hausmann — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:59:12 +0000

Hi everybody,

As we promised you can learn about the Finnish overalls today.
There is a student tradition here in Finland (it is not that old, but fun) that each university faculty has its own overall. So the overalls are different in color and have different logos on them. Students wear them to different events throughout the year and on parties. But, very important, you don’t wear the whole overall, you tie the upper part around you hips. People put different patches on them. They can be from parties, companies or just what things you like. So every overall gets unique.

This night there was the ESN (Erasmus student network) overall party. Here the exchange students had the possibility to buy overalls. But as Johannes and I preferred to get one from our own faculty we already bought our’s last week (and they are also nicer as the ESN ones are in a lighter blue). So that’s how our’s look – we already have some patches on them

Johannes H. Glitsch — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 22:00:49 +0000

Tonight we had not only the floor dinner, but also the ESN International Stereotypes Party was on. Everybody was supposed to wear something stereotypical for his/her country. Actually, there were not too many people like that at the party, but we prepared some t-shirts with another German. You can see this on the picture …

(Also you can see our cool Turku School of Economics overalls, that are worn as pants, on the picture; more about the overalls we’ll tell after Thursday’s Overall Party)

Johannes H. Glitsch — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 18:37:46 +0000

Saturday and Sunday we went to the ESN Cottage Weekend (ESN = ERASMUS Student Network). We left at about 11h having only -12°C in the city center. A few kilometers away (on the highway) the displays showed -18°C … but there were no clouds in the sky revealing a beautiful sunny day (the first in two weeks). The target was a little campground with cottages near the sea about 50 km away from Turku.

After dividing into several groups for sleeping in the six cottages we had a nice day with playing different games for a team competition. In the afternoon we had a true Finnish sauna cooling ourselves down in the snow after each turn. That was just great Later there was a nice party in the main cottage ending the day.

This is the view we had onto the sea (no lake) during midday on Saturday:

We came back a little exhausted today and had a nice nap to recover.

Johannes H. Glitsch — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 19:01:46 +0000

After a great information session of the student housing foundation (could have done this half an hour thing in about 5 minutes), where we didn’t really get any new information, we met with around 13 people in another kitchen. The two Italian guys had bought a lot of stuff to bake some pizza for us. We are not very sure whether they had done this before, but after some chaos it turned out very yummy. That was a nice thing to do and everybody stayed the whole 5 hrs until we went to the Welcome Party of all three universities of Turku (University of Turku, Abo Akademi, University of Applied Sciences).

Verena Hausmann — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 18:35:11 +0000

Today was the third and last day of our orientation days before the uni will start on Monday. We had a library introduction for the main uni library and a computer introduction course for the computers at our Turku School of Economics computers. At 1 pm a bus picked us up for a guided bus tour for all exchange students in Turku. So we drove through the city for around one hour and got some information about the city. In the evening we met with a few people in a bar, went to Hessburger to eat something before we went to a ‘pre-party’ of TuKY. TuKY is the old student union of the economic students before the Uni of Tuku and the Turku School of Economics were merged. But this wasn’t really a party as a lot of different presentations were given about the different kind of things TuKY is doing… but anyway. Around 10:30 pm we went to the Onnela, the disco were the orientation party was given. It’s quite a big disco and we had a lot of fun there.